The hospital's design doesn't just convey information about the universe and science; it also embodies the process of discovery. Layers of detail unfold with each encounter. In each inpatient room, the window shades are custom-designed murals depicting the Bronx in different time periods. One room has a shade that features the Bronx as farmland in the 19th century; another offers a view of the Bronx when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Patient rooms don't have numbers; they feature constellations, animals, or water creatures, depending on the floor's theme. A teenager might stay in the Big Dipper room, while an infant might stay in the Bumblebee room. And scattered about the patient floors are dozens of glass-covered niches displaying works of art by young children from around the city. The child-height exhibits encourage kids to create their own drawings, collages, and sculptures in the fully supplied lounges on each floor. It's an invitation to explore.

But what about the sick children who are confined to their beds? Redlener tapped Jeb Weisman, a cultural anthropologist and technology pioneer, to extend the Carl Sagan Discovery Program into an interactive bedside environment. The solution is stunning. Every child, parent, and family member who stays in the hospital gets her own smart card. Swipe the card through a reader at any of 120 locations around the hospital, and you're immediately connected to a customized virtual portal for information, entertainment, and communication. More advanced than any other patient-oriented commercial application on the market, the system can instantly switch from broadband video on demand to Gigabit Ethernet.

The motivation for building the system, says Weisman, was never about technology. It was about adding a new dimension to the hospital encounter -- and raising the stakes. "Wouldn't it be great if you could learn something about poetry, painting, chemistry, space, or oceanography while you were here?" asks Weisman. But even more important than access to new worlds is critical information about the one that kids find themselves experiencing at the moment. Says Weisman: "You should never be in a position where you are wondering about something and have no way to find out about it, whether your question is, Why does it hurt? or, What makes the sky blue?"

For Redlener, this level of design as experience is as vital as CHAM's cutting-edge medical facilities. The 106-bed hospital features a pediatric emergency room built from the ground up; a special multidisciplinary center for communication disorders; one of the nation's most advanced centers for the emergency treatment of asthma; a short-stay "day hospital" within the main hospital for children who need chemotherapy, dialysis, or other outpatient treatments; and the latest telemedical technology. A pioneering wireless, paperless order-entry system has replaced the standard chart system. Doctors can enter prescriptions directly into the system and access all available lab data on customized rolling kiosks placed on each patient floor. Almost every patient room is a single-bed private space with a sleek bathroom, a comfortable pullout sofa, a phone, and a laptop connection for families.

That's what the hospital has. To see how the hospital works, just stand in the lobby for a few minutes. One bright January day, Brandon, 13, stood mesmerized before the lobby's glass Ecosphere globe, a self-contained life system that needs no food, water, or cleaning to survive. Ask him to name his favorite part of the hospital, and he gives a breathless list: "The Ecosphere, the moving circles in the fifth-floor lobby, the pendulum ..." Ask his mother the same question, and she says, "Brandon has been coming to Montefiore since he was an infant. Today, I told him that we were going across the street to the new children's hospital, and he said, 'But mom, I'm not a child.' Then he walked in, saw the computer and the displays, and he said, 'Okay, I'll be a child.' "

Polly LaBarre (plabarre@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior editor. Contact Irwin Redlener by email (iredlener@montefiore.org). Find out more about the Children's Hospital at Montefiore (www.montefiore.org) or the Children's Health Fund (www.childrenshealthfund.org) on the Web.

Sidebar: A Gigabit at the Bedside

When Jeb Weisman set out to build an interactive virtual portal as part of the Carl Sagan Discovery Program at the Children's Hospital at Montefiore, he didn't start with technology. Instead, the anthropologist, archaeologist, college professor, and software designer turned to Sagan. "His life was about asking questions and drilling down to that 'aha' moment," says Weisman. "I wanted to find a way for even the most severely ill children to tap into that power."